o my sinuses

When I was growing up, I didn't pay any attention to the nutritional quality of the food I was eating. Not until I was 17 or so. I was, in general, very healthy and fit. Since then, as I've become more and more careful about what I eat, I get sick all the time. Additionally, I was eating food from all the street vendors in Thailand, while now I'm buying from supermarkets in the States. In other words, I need to start eating more junk food, sit around and play video games, and move somewhere warmer so I don't have to deal with all these little sicknesses.

I've been thinking recently about atheism. I wonder if more people become atheists because they can't find a use for God than from a lack of reasons to believe in God's existence. I wonder if much of the believing life is trying to find a reason to keep God around, to find something that he sustains or changes, to find some activity that he takes part in. This has become more and more difficult for me to do over the years, especially in my movement away from a morality and sin basis for understanding who God is: before, I believed that I needed God to be a good, moral person, but I don't believe that any longer. Why? Partially because I don't believe that morality is God's main interest in my life, but also just because most of the time where I do wrong or do right, God seems to be totally absent from the entire process. I don't want to invent uses for God and insert him into processes where he does not exist. That's lead me to better, healthier territory, but problem territory.

I've also been thinking about how much I hate people in general, and like them in particular. When I go around in life and see all the messes that people make, how inconsiderate, cruel, and irresponsible they are, I hate them. But when I come up against a single individual who makes a mess out of life, who is inconsiderate, cruel, and irresponsible, I often like them. Often, but not always. I think that what I hate is really an imagined person, a sort of straw man target that I mentally abuse, but who doesn't exist in reality (this is, arguably, how Jesus functions: he condemns the pharisees as a faceless, nameless mass, but he treats individuals with great compassion.) Or sometimes I bitch about people, in my head mostly, when they're not around, but then when I'm with them, whatever I'm bitching about doesn't seem to matter that much.

Contrary to contemporary Christian pop theology, I don't think it's possible to love someone unless you like them. Without liking them, you may be able to treat them with courtesy and respect, to make sacrifices for them, but I don't think it's possible to really love them when you dislike them. To like someone, I think, is to take joy in the essence of who they are, and without that joy, I don't think that love is possible. "Love the sinner, hate the sin," is also nonsense to me, along similar lines.

Let's not forget that justice isn't only about punishing those who do wrong, it's restoring those who have been wronged. When justice is talked about in the first sense, I am bored and repulsed. When it's talked about in the second sense, I'm excited. And, it is possible to have the second without the first.

Anger about the injustices in the world inhibits learning about those injustices and, summarily, inhibits the solutions to those injustices. Get angry once you know something.

I'm obviously writing my own book of proverbs.